Lawrence of Kansas

He wanted only a saddle, a camera, a typewriter, and a can of spray starch.

I first met Larry Griffin—known to all C/D staffers as “Lawrence of Kansas”—in 1989, when I was writing a road test on an Audi V-8. Larry was an exceptional writer, but on this occasion he’d swapped his Selectric for a backpack of Nikons. Because both of us were addicted to the roads of southern Ohio, we wound up sharing a room at a hotel in Marietta. “You’ll like this place,” Larry promised. “Ironing board in every room.”

While unpacking my luggage, I glanced up to discover Larry standing in front of the ironing board, a can of spray starch in one hand. He was still wearing a cowboy shirt and a blue neckerchief, but below that he was clad in Jockeys only. Concentrating like a surgeon, Larry was creating scalpel-sharp creases along the legs of his Levi’s. “This will take 10 minutes,” he said. It took 30.

“Larry would send his jeans to the dry cleaners whenever he visited,” recalls loyal pal Dale Jones. “If the crease wasn’t straight as a pool cue, he’d send ’em back. I once saw him brush his teeth for 45 minutes.”

Larry was raised in Independence, Kansas, and never knew his father. “Just as well,” he claimed, “because he was bad news.” Larry attended high school with Bill Self, who says, “I know for a fact that the two of us were the only Independence residents who knew who Phil Hill or Jimmy Clark were.” After a stint in the Army, Larry purchased a BMW 1600. Near Solvang, California, he rolled the thing 10 times down a hill. “He wasn’t hurt,” recalls Jones, who had sold him the car. “In fact, he thought it was funny. He photographed the wreckage, famous among his friends.” Larry then enrolled at the Brooks Institute of Photography near Santa Barbara, graduating in 1972 with two majors—one in illustrative photography, the other in motion-picture production.

Steve Thompson (later to become an executive editor at C/D) quickly hired Larry at Road Test magazine, and it wasn’t much longer before Larry was invited to New York for an interview with C/D’s then-editor-in-chief David E. Davis Jr. “Larry later told me that Davis instructed him to meet at such-and-such a lamppost in a Manhattan alley,” recalls Jones. “It was late, a little spooky. Suddenly out of the darkness emerges this large person wearing a cape, sort of lunging at him. Larry said, ‘I didn’t know whether to hit him or run.’ But he was ecstatic about meeting Davis, a celebrity, and getting the job. Even when he was in his teens, Larry’s goal was always to work at Car and Driver.”

Between 1978 and 2006, Larry wrote scores of road tests and features for C/D while simultaneously snapping hundreds of remarkable photos [see “Speed Work,” November 1989]. Check out what is possibly the greatest-ever portrait of Enzo Ferrari (below). Larry thought nothing of driving 5000 miles every couple of weeks [see “Border to Border and Back,” May 1990]. He became an industry mole, chronicling Ford Aerospace’s secret construction of the wild front-engine Mustang GTP [see “Thunder and Lightning, Blue and White,” November 1983]. He befriended dozens of pro racers, among them two Bobbies—Rahal and ­Unser. He described and photographed 40 of America’s most scenic and challenging roads. He was likely the first person to explain in detail what would be required to make in-car cameras work, a notion he pitched to a rapt Il Commendatore in Mara­nello. And he taught himself to write by studying the likes of Patrick Bedard, about whom he once said, “What takes me seven words to say, Pat can say in three.”

Of course, Larry eventually scored his own masterstrokes of literary brevity, among them a counterpoint for the Fiat Strada [April 1979] in which he wrote, “Torch the sucker!”

“For 10 years, Larry lived in an apartment full of rented furniture,” recalls former C/D editor-in-chief William Jeanes. “God loves a man who’s able to hit the trail at the drop of a 10-gallon hat.” Larry owned a lot of 10-gallon hats and hit the trail often. “As the resident night owl,” recalls former executive editor Steven Cole Smith, “I’d be typing away and hear the front door open. Sure enough, here’d come Larry at 1:30 a.m. He’d sit and thumb through magazines, I’d type, we’d exchange 10 words—sort of taciturn, Deadwood-like moments commemorative of an era when men who did not have much to say did not. An hour later he’d leave and be on the road for another six weeks.” Out of loyalty to Indy-car owner Jim Trueman, Larry always stayed at Red Roof Inns.

But what his friends mostly remember is Larry’s genius as a driver. “For sheer deftness behind the wheel,” says former managing editor Art St. Antoine, “the man was an artist.”

“He’d take forever to achieve an ideal driving position,” recalls current editor-in-chief Csaba Csere. “It seemed somewhat absurd until a driver swap during a comparison test, when Larry said our Porsche 928’s damping felt a little off in the left-rear corner. No one else had felt a thing. I poked my head underneath. Sure enough, fluid was weeping from the left-rear shock. I never made fun of Larry’s focused driving again.”

Which isn’t to say the man was infallible. “I was in a BMW following Larry in a Pontiac Grand Prix,” recalls former executive editor Rich Ceppos. “I was marveling at the guy’s ability to keep such a massive car between the lines. At which point he went straight off and hit a tree. I saw the underside of the Prix for a moment as it came to rest. When I got to the driver’s door, Larry was groping for his glasses. He sat up, wide-eyed and dazed, his wiry hair standing on end in a huge Afro. He looked like Jimi Hendrix.”

After leaving C/D, Larry yielded to his inner cowboy and made his living by creating photo murals of western landscapes, one of which hangs in my office. At one point, his works were on display in four galleries in California and three in Montana. He said he wanted “to revel in horses and cattle, rope and chaps, mountains and plains, hats with broad brims and high crowns banded in sweat, quiet guys brown of jaw and pale of forehead, etched early by weather and set with eyes shy around people but sure on the range.” Larry could go on like that, especially as he selected which cowboy boots to wear that day.

I once asked Larry his secret to smooth driving. “First, don’t draw attention to yourself,” he said. “Second, don’t get distracted.” (He refused even to listen to a car’s radio.) And his third piece of advice was lifted from the movie Field of Dreams, which Larry admitted to having viewed 28 times. In that film, a rookie batter asks the umpire if he possesses any tips regarding beanballs. “Sure,” says the ump. “Watch out you don’t get killed.”

In the end, Larry wasn’t watching out. On March 15, he died of complications from pneumonia. He now reposes in Mount Hope Cemetery, in Independence, where, as a teen, he delivered grave blankets and floral sprays out of the back of the local florist’s Ford Fairlane wagon, “which he put into four-wheel drifts whenever possible,” recalls Bill Self, “especially while approaching the cemetery.”

Larry’s admirers are invited to relax on the Griffin memorial bench in front of his favorite place on the planet, Kellem’s Montana Saddlery, in Gardiner, Montana.

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*AccuPayment estimates payments under various scenarios for budgeting and informational purposes only. AccuPayment does not state credit or lease terms that are available from a creditor or lessor, and AccuPayment is not an offer or promotion of a credit or lease transaction.